Ternary Search

Last time, I wrote about my experience debugging an issue where engineers commuting to and from the office caused production network blips.

This is a recollection of a particularly tricky bug I encountered in a production system during my time at Sumo Logic in 2013, when I was just a few years out of school and still new to building software.

Back in the early days of LLMs, it was a struggle to get structured output out of models, which made it hard to use the results in a programmatic way -- there was no well-defined interface.

In the original implementation of kfchess.com, game state lived only in the memory of the single python process backend that ran the whole site.

Running frontier LLMs is slow, but that's the tradeoff we make to get more intelligent output.

The world of GPU programming for AI has come a long way since I worked on writing a CUDA-based matrix library back in 2009.

As LLMs become larger, more capable, and more ubiquitous, the field of mechanistic interpretability -- that is, understanding the inner workings of these models -- becomes increasingly interesting and important.

This is the follow-up to my post from two weeks ago on observations using Claude Code (Opus 4.5 to start, 4.6 after it released) to rebuild the kfchess.com website, with the constraint that I would not write any of the code myself. 60k lines of code and 1…

Following up on the last post, I want to write about this new paper from NVIDIA on quantization-aware distillation.

With the rise of large language models and the desire to run them more cheaply and efficiently, the concept of quantization has gained a lot of traction.

An interesting file system feature that I came across a few years ago is sparse files.

Firstly, I'm celebrating the 12-year revival of this blog!

In the field of distributed systems, the CAP theorem is an important result that often guides the design of such systems.

Last time, I wrote about a clever algorithm for approximating the histogram for a stream using bounded memory.

It's been a while, but I finally motivated myself to write another blog post!

The virtual currency bitcoin has been getting a lot of hype and news recently, as the price per coin has gone from about \$14 at the beginning of the year to a high of over \$1200 last week with a subsequent drop to its current value, which is between \$7…

Last time, I wrote about the high-level ideas behind the Scala libraries akka and spray, namely the concept of reactive programming in order to meet the demands of modern applications.

There's an interesting idea being pushed forward by the Scala community about the way systems should be built, and it's called reactive programming.

In Scala, the concept of a "for loop" doesn't really exist.

Using memcached on top of a traditional relational database (RDBMS) has become the most popular way of building large-scale web services, as it is both simple and fast in the majority of cases.

Apache Kafka is a distributed messaging system developed by LinkedIn.

In the previous two posts, I introduced Google's Go programming language and the model of concurrent programming that it adopts.

Last time, I wrote about some of the interesting and unique design decisions regarding dependencies and imports in Google's Go programming language.

I recently started learning more about Google's Go programming language, which has been on the radar for several years now and seems to be gaining more traction.

Today I learned that Riak, a distributed database based on Amazon's Dynamo, is written in Erlang.